Health and Wellness

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CNN Spreading Innacurate Info on Cervical Cancer Vaccine
Posted by , Feministe on July 8, 2008 at 12:00 PM.

By Habladora

I can’t decide if this is an example of careless reporting, or of intentional fear-mongering. While there is no solid evidence that Gardasil is dangerous, CNN’s article “Should parents worry about HPV vaccine?” seems to be written with the aim of confusing the public into believing otherwise:

Gardasil has been the subject of 7,802 “adverse event” reports from the time the Food and Drug Administration approved its use two years ago, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Girls and women have blamed the vaccine for causing ailments from nausea to paralysis — even death. Fifteen deaths were reported to the FDA, and 10 were confirmed, but the CDC says none of the 10 were linked to the vaccine. The CDC says it continues to study the reports of illness.

While the idea that the HPV vaccinations might be unsafe is scary, at this point in CNN’s article I’m most appalled by a major news organization’s apparent lack of interest in conveying any real information to readers about an issue that concerns the safety of women and girls, and that could impact people’s decisions on whether or not to get vaccinated.

Let’s start with the first statement - that 7,802 “adverse event” reports have been filed. The obvious follow-up question that should occur to any reporter is “well, how many of these adverse events have actually been linked to Gardasil?” One might also wonder what the average adverse event report rate is for any vaccine, and if those reports decline after the vaccination is proven to be safe. Readers naturally want to know, after such a sensational headline, well - should we be worried, or are people drawing connections between illnesses and the vaccine where none actually exist?

The article’s second sensational statement, that “[f]ifteen deaths were reported to the FDA,” immediately looses its steam when we realize that none of those deaths have been linked to Gardasil. At this point in my reading, I began to doubt CNN’s motives - they wouldn’t strum-up fear just because it’s good for ratings, would they?

Finally, CNN presents us with the terrifying story of a teenager who developed pancreatitis not long after taking the vaccine. While I am not insensible to how horrifying such a serious illness would be for a young girl and her family, it should be CNN’s responsibility to verify whether or not her fear that it was related to the vaccine could be founded - by researching how many of those incident reports dealt with pancreatitis, for example, or other autoimmune diseases. This type of reporting is important, after all, since it could impact women’s decisions and, consequently, their health.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Nude Prosecutor Wants Job Back
Posted by Lindsay Beyerstein on July 8, 2008 at 8:00 AM.

A former city prosecutor who lost his job for walking around nude at night has won the first round of his battle to get his job back:

HAMILTON - A former city prosecutor who was fired for taking nude after-hours strolls in a public building has won a court victory in his battle to get his job back.

Scott Blauvelt, 36, is entitled to civil-service job protection, Visiting Judge Thomas Nurre ruled in a decision filed June 25 in Butler County Common Pleas Court.

The decision, if it stands, means Blauvelt would be entitled to have a civil service panel consider whether to rehire him.

City Law Director Hillary Stevenson says she disagrees with Nurre's analysis of Blauvelt's job situation and will seek a reversal from the Ohio 12th District Court of Appeals in Middletown.

The saga has been going on since late 2006.

Stevenson fired Blauvelt after security cameras videotaped his naked nighttime walks through the Government Services Center downtown. Blauvelt was then working in that building.

Blauvelt's lawyer, Mike Gmoser, says Blauvelt has overcome the mental problems that fueled his odd behavior, and he's back to work as a criminal defense lawyer in Hamilton.[Cinc Inqu]

Hamilton, OH should give Blauvelt another chance. When the incident occurred, he was suffering from some mental health issues which were causing his eccentric but objectively harmless behavior. It's not even clear that he broke the law.

Now that he's healthy again and functioning normally as a private criminal defense attorney, he deserves the opportunity to prove that he's ready to go back to work for the city.

[Photo by Lord Khan]

Watermelon is the New Viagra
Posted by Lindsay Beyerstein, AlterNet on July 3, 2008 at 3:11 PM.

A new study funded by the US Department of Agriculture suggests that watermelon contains a compound that might have effects similar to erectile dysfunction drugs like Viagra and Levitra.

"Arginine boosts nitric oxide, which relaxes blood vessels, the same basic effect that Viagra has, to treat erectile dysfunction and maybe even prevent it," said Bhimu Patil, a researcher and director of Texas A&M's Fruit and Vegetable Improvement Center. "Watermelon may not be as organ-specific as Viagra, but it's a great way to relax blood vessels without any drug side effects."

Todd Wehner, who studies watermelon breeding at North Carolina State University, said anyone taking Viagra shouldn't expect the same result from watermelon.

"It sounds like it would be an effect that would be interesting but not a substitute for any medical treatment," Wehner said.

The nitric oxide can also help with angina, high blood pressure and other cardiovascular problems, according to the study, which was paid for by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. [SF Gate]

The only problem is that you'd probably have to eat about 6 cups of watermelon to get enough of the active ingredient, citrulline, to achieve the desired effect. But that's where our friends at the Fruit and Vegetable Improvement Center come in... It might be possible to modify melons to produce more citrulline, researchers say.

Is this a great country, or what?

Woman Convulses and Dies, Ignored, in Waiting Room of New York City Hospital
Posted by Jill Filipovic, Feministe on July 3, 2008 at 1:39 PM.

If this story doesn’t disgust you, I don’t know what will:

It was a nightmare captured on surveillance video. A woman who had waited nearly 24 hours to be seen in a Brooklyn public hospital collapsed, fell face-down on the floor, convulsed and for nearly an hour — while several hospital staff members looked at her and one staff member even prodded her with her foot — received no aid. At some point during that time, she died.

The New York Civil Liberties Union has been sounding the alarm about New York City hospitals for some time now, calling the emergency room and inpatient units at Kings County Hospital “a chamber of filth, decay, indifference and danger.” It’s disgusting that someone had to die before the city bothered doing anything about it.

And this is just the one that we know about because the video was released on YouTube. The callous disregard that the hospital employees showed to Esmin Green is not possibly a one-time occurrence. Ms. Green was a poor, mentally ill woman of color. She apparently didn’t matter one bit to the employees at the hospital who were supposed to be giving her care. I would bet everything I own that she is not the first “unimportant” patient to receive that kind of treatment — she is just the first to have her death broadcast on YouTube, and so she is the first that the city cannot turn a blind eye towards.

And via Panopticon in the comments:

A state agency, the New York State Mental Hygiene Legal Service, filed a lawsuit a year ago, calling the psychiatric center “a chamber of filth, decay, indifference and danger.”

Patients, the suit said, “are subjected to overcrowded and squalid conditions often accompanied by physical abuse and unnecessary and punitive injections of mind-altering drugs.”

“From the moment a person steps through the doors,” it added, “she is stripped of her freedom and dignity and literally forced to fight for the essentials of life.”

The suit was especially critical of the hospital’s emergency ward, saying it is so poorly staffed that patients are often marooned there for days while they wait to be evaluated.

Sometimes, the unit runs out of chairs, according to the lawsuit, forcing people to wait on foam mats or on the waiting room floor. The suit also claims that bathrooms are filthy and filled with flies, and that patients who complain too loudly are sometimes handcuffed, beaten or injected with psychotropic drugs.

In case this doesn’t make it clear, mental health (and health care in general) is a feminist issue. This should appall and enrage all of us.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Doctors Complain About How Terrible They Have It
Posted by Matthew Holt, The Health Care Blog on June 30, 2008 at 12:36 PM.

An essay in the NY times explains how terrible life is for doctors. Reimbursement is down, more time is spent arguing with managed care companies, there are more restrictions on the what they can prescribe, etc, etc.

Now I understand that primary care is in crisis, but overall physicians' salaries in the last couple of years have gone up, and the first doctor in the article is a cardiologist. Cardiologists, as this salary survey suggests, tend to make more than double what a primary care doc gets. And of course, fewer doctors are primary care only now, and more are specialists (who make more money!). But whether or not physicians are getting paid less than they were, their perception surely is that that's the case.

I am surprised that the burden of operating a practice and the demands of "managed care" are felt to have increased. Most observers would suggest that insurers have, since the days of Len Abramson & US Healthcare in the 1990s, backed off the extremes of medical micro-management. In fact, the most profitable health plan of recent years (Aetna) has bent over backwards to appear to be physician friendly. Whether or not it's just window dressing is less certain.

If a doc living in the 1970s was forced into a 1990s world, I would understand the depression. And the surveys I was part of in the 90s indeed showed dismay at what was happening for them. But we're now more than 10 years on from those times, and (as the politicians say) is it really worse now than it was four or five years ago?

Family Values: House Passes Paid Parental Leave Bill
Posted by Lindsay Beyerstein, AlterNet on June 20, 2008 at 11:51 AM.

Yesterday, the House passed a bill that would provide for paid parental leave for all federal employees to care for a newborn, or newly-adopted child:

The House on Thursday passed legislation that would institute a paid parental leave policy for all federal employees.

The House voted 278-146 to pass H.R. 5781, which would provide four weeks of paid maternal or paternal leave for the birth or adoption of a child. It would, for the first time, let new parents use their accrued sick leave for an additional eight weeks of paid leave.

Under current law, employees can use only a combination of paid annual leave, sick leave and unpaid leave under the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act for childbirth or adoption. Parents can take up to 12 weeks of unpaid maternity or paternity leave and are limited to 13 days of paid sick leave to care for newborn or adopted children.

"If we're ever going to have the kind of federal workforce that we can all be proud of ... then we have to be able to keep pace with the private sector," Rep. Danny K. Davis, D-Ill., said at a Thursday news briefing. "I am not one of those individuals who believe that if you want something done well, you get the private sector do it." [Government Executive]

Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) introduced companion legislation in the Senate this week.

The leave bill passed the House by a comfortable margin, but not a veto-proof majority. President Bush is expected to veto the bill if it comes across his desk. How's that for Family Values?

Health Insurance and Hard Choices
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon on June 19, 2008 at 4:41 PM.

Salon has a doctor writing about how even “socialized” health care is way too expensive because the emphasis is on “get sick, go to the doctor” instead of on prevention. Like pretty much all decent people outside of the U.S., he takes first world nations’ responsibility to see to the health care of all citizens as a moral given, much the way Americans see “socialized” education, roads, and fire departments as a given. So really, this is just an argument about the hows, not the whethers. It’s worth noting that Dr. Parikh uses Canada as his main point of comparison, and theirs considered one of the most inefficient universal health systems.

That said, I agree with him that an ounce of prevention really is worth a pound of cure in health care. Which is why I lose my shit watching wingnuts in D.C. redirect HIV aid from prevention to treatment, because I believe they think AIDS is a good disincentive/punishment for having sex and they don’t want to interfere with catching it. No matter if you can get AIDS drugs to every man, woman, and child who needs them around the world, you’ll save more lives if you blunt the spread of the disease through condoms and education. Few diseases, once acquired, have a magic bullet cure. To use a more mundane example, think about dentistry. They can do amazing things in that field, fix teeth that a century before would have fallen right out your head with a lot of pain attending. If you do lose your teeth, they can make new ones for you. But there’s no crown, no filling, no dentures that can equal the tooth you grew by yourself, and any dentist will tell you that. The disease of tooth decay wasn’t cured, really, but its worst symptoms were managed. Same story with heart disease, diabetes, and other illnesses that plague our health care system.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Detained Immigrants Continue to Die in American Custody
Posted by Liza Sabater, Culture Kitchen on June 19, 2008 at 10:15 AM.

I would have subtitled this video "America's New Civil War":

From the production company :

The New York Times and the Washington Post have recently reported on the "System of Neglect," namely, the state of immigration detention center conditions. As told by her sister June Everett, watch the story of Sandra Kenley, a 52- year-old grandmother, who after living in the U.S. legally for 33 years, was subjected to these very conditions and died in immigration detention.

National Day of Protest Against Health Insurance Corporations
Posted by Heather Gehlert on June 16, 2008 at 7:29 AM.

More than 47 million Americans don't have health insurance (with millions more under-insured), employer-based health insurance is on the decline, and soaring medical bills are a leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States.

The statistics are sobering. The time for action is now.

Thursday, June 19 is a national day of protest and your chance to push back against health insurers that put profits before people. Protests are being planned in locations across the United States, from California to Kentucky, and will coincide with the annual convention of America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), a powerful lobby that wants to stop health care reform efforts.

Visit www.guaranteedhealthcare.org to join the fight and www.healthcare-now.org/june19.html to find more information on exact locations and times of protests in your area.

Medicare Fraud Tops $60 Billion Per Year
Posted by Lindsay Beyerstein, Majikthise on June 16, 2008 at 2:00 AM.

The Washington Post delves into the multi-billion dollar fraud problem afflicting Medicare.

The program's internal accounting safeguards are designed to detect unorthodox medical treatment and over billing. Out and out fraud? Not so much.

The Post's experts estimate that criminals bilk the system out of more than $60 billion per year. A lone Florida woman, a high school dropout, bilked the system out of $105 million, working from home on her laptop.

It's an interesting story on an important issue--but one thing is missing: Which firms hold contracts to maintain the internal accountability systems in Medicare? It's a safe bet that these functions were privatized long ago. Let's have some accountability from the firms that provide IT to the government. Which companies are preventing waste, fraud and abuse, and which ones are part of the problem?

Coburn Places A Hold On HIV/AIDS Prevention Bill
Posted by Amanda Terkel, Think Progress on June 11, 2008 at 1:00 PM.

The Senate has introduced a bipartisan bill tripling funding for President Bush’s program to fight HIV/AIDS. The $50 billion budget over five years would go toward the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which is set to expire in September.

The legislation, however, is being held up by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and six other conservative senators who object to the fact that the program would direct most of the spending on the “prevention” of HIV/AIDS, rather than just “treatment.” The treatment of HIV/AIDS-infected individuals is “the No. 1 prevention protocol we have” argued Coburn.

Coburn may be an obstetrician, but he seems to be out of the mainstream with other medical professionals on this issue, who say that focusing on treatment as a form of prevention is short-sighted and ineffective:

“Most experts agree that treatment is only one small part of the prevention agenda,” said Denis Nash, director of monitoring, evaluation and research at the International Center for AIDS Care and Treatment Programs at Columbia University. […]

“The prevention effect of treatment is not likely to be anywhere near the magnitude of prevention through prevention,” including safe-sex education and condom distribution, said Mead Over, senior fellow at the Center for Global Development.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

WHO Updates AIDS Model - Christian Conservatives Go Crazy
Posted by Daniel DiRito, The All Spin Zone on June 11, 2008 at 4:59 AM.

A new assessment of the AIDS epidemic by the World Health Organization drew an immediate response from the Family Research Council. Given the content of the FRC response, it appears that 25 years has done little to end the labeling of those with the disease as morally inferior.

Commentary By: Daniel DiRito

The inclination to view natural disasters and disease as signs of God’s wrath remains a frightening demonstration of the dangers of religious dogma. Time and again, a vocal group of religious leaders attribute these tragedies to the morality of those affected.

One long standing example is HIV/AIDS, though there are many more. When HIV first appeared, there were numerous religious leaders and politicians who chose to characterize the disease as punishment for homosexuality. Since the beginning, the fact that the infection rate in lesbians was a fraction of that found in gay men seemed to defy the efforts to apply a moral judgment. Regardless, the prevalence of these prejudices continues to exist.

The release of a new report by the World Health Organization, in which the organization acknowledges that HIV isn’t likely to become a heterosexual pandemic, has already triggered a new round of moral pronouncements. I’ll discuss the invective offered by the Family Research Council beneath the following excerpts. They are from an article in The Independent which details the reports conclusions.

A quarter of a century after the outbreak of Aids, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has accepted that the threat of a global heterosexual pandemic has disappeared.

In the first official admission that the universal prevention strategy promoted by the major Aids organisations may have been misdirected, Kevin de Cock, the head of the WHO’s department of HIV/Aids said there will be no generalised epidemic of Aids in the heterosexual population outside Africa.

Dr De Cock, an epidemiologist who has spent much of his career leading the battle against the disease, said understanding of the threat posed by the virus had changed. Whereas once it was seen as a risk to populations everywhere, it was now recognised that, outside sub-Saharan Africa, it was confined to high-risk groups including men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and sex workers and their clients.

[…] But we have to be careful. As an epidemiologist it is better to describe what we can measure. There could be small outbreaks in some areas.”

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